FAST FOOD AD 2025: Nineteenth Helping

FAST FOOD AD 2025: Nineteenth Helping

The leadership of an institutional Church can in its freedom create a Church as an organization structured on the teaching of Jesus or it can create a Church as an organization structured on the model of a corporation or on the model of a state. But, to choose the corporate model or the state model is to abdicate the task of creating an institutional Church structured in conformity with the teachings of Jesus, because the corporate and state models are constructed to require the employment of violence. But, Jesus commissioned His Church, His Community, to find new forms and new structures for an entirely new idea of human association, namely, a community where love in His model and according to His teaching is what every structure, policy, practice and choice of His Community would require, depend on and foster internally and externally.

 So the Church should be a Community chosen by Jesus that is living, according to the Way of Jesus’ Nonviolent Love of all under all circumstances for all time. It should be living in adoration and thanksgiving to the Father of all, and in Christlike care full loving service to suffering humanity. There can be no “timeouts” from following the Nonviolent Jesus of the Gospels and trying to live in the Way He taught, in order to build or maintain an institutional Church to tell people about and to bring people to following the Nonviolent Jesus. That would be farcical. An institution, where the use and justification of violence, even homicidal violence, is so normalized that it is taken for granted to be a way acceptable and approved of by Jesus, is going to expend as little as possible of its time, thought, effort and  money to communicate the depth of the temporal and eternal seriousness of the Nonviolent Jesus’ Way of Nonviolent Love of friends and enemies, for the obvious reason that it would be presenting truth against interests, that is, against its own institutional, and perhaps personal, worldly interests.

-Emmanuel Charles McCarthy